“Wipe Thy Self”: A Page from the Audubon Ledger at the Lilly Library

Christoph Irmscher, Provost Professor of English and Director of the Wells Scholars Program

In spring 2016, the Lilly Library acquired a handsome ledger bound in sturdy marble-covered boards. Dubbed the “Audubon Ledger” by bookseller Donald Heald, volume had been in the possession of Audubon’s great-granddaughter, Margaret Audubon McCormick until it was sold at Sotheby’s on January 26, 1983. The earliest entry in the book dates from December 10, 1842; the latest was made on February 14, 1844.

The Audubon Ledger is a treasure trove for the scholar: it is chock-full with lists documenting Audubon’s income and expenditures as he was finishing work on the Royal Octavo edition of Birds of America (1840-1844) and beginning to launch his new venture, The Viviparous Quadrupeds of North America. Eight pages of draft letters, all in the handwriting of Audubon’s son Victor Gifford, add to the documentary value of the collection. But the Ledger has something else to offer too, something more unexpected. Among the 70-plus pages of lists we find an example of a different kind of bookkeeping, a mysterious page-long aside, in Audubon’s own handwriting, consisting of nothing but a stream of words, slathered on the page in no apparent order and, it seems, with near-complete disregard to meaning. Complete sentences are the exception rather than the rule.

Transcription

219:

Second Course

Acquisition and use of Words in little sentences

Wipe Pocket to wash

Fish, Wipe, Table, deceits Smoke Pad Bush–

Tables, Indian Ink Pocket Ashes Ashes

Towels to wipe, to wash, to catch to pilfer dainties

to extinguish, to listen, to smoke to draw with water color

to wipe wiped mixed washed pilfered between

already beautiful, Shine shrine rail sight

The table is high, The pocket is wide, Pilfer

not that is not nice Wipe thy self.

Bath Thread Needle

Wheel Bath Oath envy harm song

Songs box, calf, (maggot, mite) fashion tired

waste booth both Silk (Willow pasture) boundary

Box boxes thread hurt to separate to avoid

(Willows to pasture) neither again Songs leather feather

(cart load, a tan [?]) mould vein quarrel noble

herd, poodle, nudel, needles, skull, there,

there that the to the the thine one no mine his

(clear pure) Wine by shine flax stone.

The wheel is on the wagon The mite

is in the cheese The Willow is a tree.

Roof week to travel (to range to string)

Book Brook Roof partition ah I me self

thee (yet, however) (still, yet) high hole leek

Stomach breath smoke, rich soft proud cloth

Book beech (search to sack) (matter thing affair)

revenge (guard watch) week cook kitchen oak

corpse (pool laughter) to laugh—to make to pilfer

throat to rake to reach rays to cook cake

The book is new The brook is deep The beech is a

tree The smoke comes out of the chimney.

The page that precedes this strange jumble of words (p. 214) is as ordinary as they come: a list of monies the Audubons had collected in New York City on July 14, 1844, from subscribers to the Royal Octavo edition. It is, as is most everything else in the volume, in Victor Gifford Audubon’s handwriting. Subsequent pages seem to have been cut out, and the number at the top of our strange meditation has been corrected to read “219.”

It’s difficult at first to discern some kind of principle behind this profusion of words. Some come from the same semantic field (“wipe,” “wash,” “bath” “clear,” “pure”), some are repeated a number of times (“wipe” occurs, in somewhat different form six times; “pilfer” and “smoke” three times; “wash” twice). Sometimes Audubon’s words acquire an incantatory quality and sound displaces meaning: “to rake to reach rays to cook cake.” Other passages—especially the few fully formed sentences—are almost embarrassingly simple, as if they had been lifted from a children’s picture book: “The wheel is on the wagon The mite is in the cheese The Willow is a tree.” “The smoke comes out of the chimney.” As we read on, elements of a landscape begin to emerge—willows, beech trees, a brook, a pasture, a house with a roof and a kitchen, smoke coming from the chimney. (I am immediately reminded of the “inscrutable house” in Elizabeth Bishop’s wonderful poem “Sestina.”) Then there is the feel of things, the soft, rich cloth of a dress (made of silk?) worn, perhaps, by a mother. “Pilfer not,” she might have said to her child, “that is not nice.” And: “Wipe thyself.” We have, indeed, entered a child’s world, as the novelist Katherine Govier pointed out to me when I showed her a copy of that page. But Audubon was a child not in England or America, where mothers or maids would have said such things. He grew up in Napoleon’s blood-drenched France, raised by his stepmother. The sounds made in this text—“Wheel Bath Oath,” “waste booth both,” “nudel, needles, skull,” “book Brook Roof””—are entirely English, as is the landscape it evokes, however confusedly. Sing willow, willow, willow.

This page, then, evokes a childhood Audubon never really had, at least not in that form, a childhood he therefore couldn’t have outgrown. Hence, too, the sense of loss that pervades this page, a loss of purity and perhaps of life—the mite in the cheese, the maggot, the ashes, the skull, the corpse. Pilfer not, the mother once said, and yet Audubon did, his entire adult life, when he entered into, and took away, the lives of birds. And the need to “wipe thyself” would have been immediately clear to someone who spent his days wading through dirt and blood. Birds weren’t “nice” in their habits, Audubon once said (in his essay about the Shoveler Duck; Ornithological Biography 241). But neither was he. “To draw with watercolor,” Audubon writes, close to the beginning of our page: an apparent reference to the work he did. And he goes on to define what he did: “to wipe wiped mixed washed pilfered between already beautiful.” All watercolors on the world could not wash out the damn’d spots each killing of a bird—of a living thing that was “already beautiful,” something that didn’t need the artist to make it so—left in him.

Of course, you might say, this is all speculation, a fantasy. The title of the page (“Second Course”) and dry-and-dust subtitle (“Acquisition and use….”) might just mean that Audubon was reading a grammar textbook at the time and taking notes. But for whom? Or had the insecurities he had felt as a non-native speaker finally caught up with him? In a journal he kept in England in 1826, he referred to himself as a man who “never Lookd into an English grammar” (Writings 186). But by the mid-1840s, he was widely respected as writer, even by other writers: Longfellow, for example, based his Evangeline partly on the descriptions of Louisiana he had found in Audubon’s essays. But maybe he was collecting words because he was getting ready to teach his grandchildren about homonyms and synonyms and the like? Thomas Brewer, who visited Audubon on July 4, 1846, did attest to Audubon’s fondness for the “rising generation” (Herrick 2: 288).

However, the sheer difficulty of the fragment casts doubt on these more pedestrian readings. What good are notes that make no sense? And speaking of non-sense, perhaps this text is a clinical document more than anything else. Audubon’s dementia became an established fact in May 1848, when his friend John Bachman visited him on his estate and found the naturalist’s “noble mind all in ruins” (Herrick 2: 289). But this change had not happened overnight—as early as July 1847, Spencer Fullerton Baird found his former mentor “much changed” (Herrick 2:288). Did the first signs of his illness announce themselves even earlier? We now know for sure what Alzheimer patients have perhaps always known intuitively, namely that language dysfunction is one of the first indications of the disease. And we also know, and some of us have probably experienced it when taking are of a family member, that dementia patients still retain a measure of control over “a lexical phonological system that is used to repeat both known and novel words and that processes linguistic information independent of its meaning” (Glosser et al.). But what if the last part of that statement—that there is no meaning in these repetitions—isn’t true after all? What if all we needed to do is listen? What if meaning—if of a different, more fantastical, speculative kind—still resides somewhere even in the lexicon of the troubled mind, waiting for the right person to unlock it? “The brook is deep.” John James continues to baffle us.

References

Audubon, John James. Ornithological Biography, or An Account of the Habits of theBbirds of the United States of America: Accompanied by Descriptions of the Objects Represented in the Work entitled The Birds of America, and Interspersed with Delineations of American Scenery and Manners. Vol. 4. Edinburgh: Judah Dobson, 1839.